Fuzzy features but clearly fearful
I’m struggling with the concept of hell. Unending torment…never ceasing…forever and ever and ever. It just doesn’t seem just.
Here’s how the great 18th century preacher Jonathan Edwards described it:
Consider what it is to suffer extreme torment forever and ever; and to suffer it day and night, from one year to another, from one age to another, and from one thousand ages to another…Consider how dreadful despair will be in such torment; to know assuredly that you never, never shall be delivered from them; to have no hope: when you shall wish that you might be turned into nothing, but shall have no hope of it…but that still there are the same groans, the same shrieks, the same doleful cries, incessantly to be made by you…1
Would a good, just, loving God really require people he made in his image to suffer conscious torment for all eternity, with absolutely no hope of escape? It seems so.
Now, I’ve heard and read enough accounts of extreme depravity and devilish cruelty that seem to warrant eternal suffering. But what about those who live relatively good lives but reject the payment for their sin God offers through faith in Christ? Do they deserve a joyless, hopeless, endless existence of extreme despair?
The Bible gives few clues to the nature or cause of the torment. It’s described as both “utter darkness” and “unquenchable fire.” But fire gives light so I believe the flames are metaphorical, using a familiar concept which we know to be extremely painful to represent an extremely painful experience with which we are not familiar.
Imagine if it is complete and utter darkness for all eternity, but unlike blind people who can still enjoy pleasures like eating and conversing and engaging in meaningful work, you have nothing but your guilty, despairing, sorrowful thoughts to occupy you. Forever.
Whatever form hell takes, it seems clear from Scripture that it will be completely void of God’s blessings. We take these blessings for granted now, but imagine an existence without any sunlight, rain, beauty, food, or any good thing, which all come from him. Only sin and evil, pain and suffering.
The prospect of an eternity in hell should and has brought many people to their knees and into the kingdom of God. But the preaching of eternal torment in hell has drawn others up in defiance and rejection of Christianity because of its perceived injustice.
Here’s where I land when I ponder this perception: God is clearly revealed in Scripture as just, but logic affirms this as well. If we can conceive of a supreme being more just than the biblical God, then that being would be God. God is the greatest conceivable being.
He is also merciful, as is demonstrated in all its fullness in the generous and eternal forgiveness he offers to all sinners who come to him in repentance and faith. There must be other contributing factors which justify eternal torment that we are unable to fully grasp.
So, though hell’s exact features may be fuzzy, and its rightness debatable, its horrendous and interminable awfulness is clear.
It is a destiny to be avoided at all costs.
1Works of Jonathan Edwards, 2 vols. (1843; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1974), 2:88.
